Keurig's Vue individual coffee roasting system is displayed during a Green Mountain Coffee Roasters news conference in New York, Feb. 15, 2012. The coffee machine can also prepare frothy hot beverages as well as iced drinks. / AP Photo/Kathy Willens

Written by

Dan D’Ambrosio

Free Press Staff Writer

A California coffee company has filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. of violating antitrust and unfair competition laws, following in the footsteps of an Illinois company that filed a similar lawsuit in February.

The Rogers Family Co. in Lincoln, Calif. alleges in its lawsuit that Keurig Green Mountain, formerly known as Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, has used its monopoly power in the single-serve coffee brewer and coffee pod markets to require its distribution partners to enter into “exclusive anticompetitive agreements designed to maintain Keurig’s monopoly power by excluding competition.”

In February, TreeHouse Foods Inc., based in Oak Brook, Ill., and two wholly owned subsidiaries, Bay Valley Foods, LLC, and Sturm Foods, Inc., filed a 141-page complaint in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, alleging exclusionary agreements between Green Mountain Coffee and various suppliers and distributors are designed to maintain the Waterbury company’s monopoly power in the K-Cup portion pack market following the expiration of GMCR’s patent on the K-Cup in September 2012.

TreeHouse is a multi-billion-dollar company that specializes in manufacturing private label food products, including single serving portion packs for the Keurig brewer.

Keurig Green Mountain Spokeswoman Suzanne DuLong said Thursday, “We believe these claims are totally without merit, and we intend to defend these lawsuits vigorously.”

Both the Rogers and TreeHouse lawsuits cite Keurig’s new line of brewers, called the Keurig 2.0, which lock out competitors’ coffee pod products, as another example of anti-competitive behavior. Rogers alleges that Keurig has made “false, disparaging comments about Rogers’ coffee pod products and has already begun to try to persuade distributors and retailers not to purchase Rogers’ and other competitors’ coffee pods based on representations that they will not function with the forthcoming Keurig 2.0 brewers.”

“We filed this lawsuit to end Keurig’s anticompetitive practices which deny consumers access to our and other competitors’ products,” said Rogers Family Co. President Jon Rogers in a statement. “No single company should be permitted to control consumer choice or prices through illegal, anti-competitive conduct.”

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, as the company was then known, sued Rogers Family Co. in November 2011, alleging the California company had violated its K-Cup patents with its OneCup single serving portion pack, which is 97 percent biodegradable. Green Mountain Coffee lost that lawsuit in May 2013 and appealed to the Federal Circuit, where the company also lost this week.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected Green Mountain Coffee’s appeal and affirmed the U.S. District Court’s decision last year that granted Rogers summary judgment that it did not infringe Green Mountain Coffee patents and that Rogers’ OneCup single serve product is unique.